Won’t Take No for an Answer—15-Year-Old Conquers the Marathon

When Lila Carleton was 10, her parents told her that she couldn’t go to a party at a neighbor’s house unless she cleaned her room.

She wouldn’t and, in the end, they left without her—but Lila rode her bicycle to the party anyway, over three hilly miles in a pouring rainstorm.

“I had this moment where I was, like, ‘Do I get angry or am I proud?’” remembered Lila’s mother, Brooke.

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So when Lila was determined to run a marathon at 15, despite the event’s age limit of 16, resistance from her high school coaches, and concern from her runner parents, they all knew they would eventually have to give in.

The Vermont City Marathon ultimately created a special category for her, and Lila Carleton finished with a time of 4:18:23. The next step after that? Jump on a bus to Boston and fly to London so she could join the rest of her family, which had already left on a long-planned vacation.

Her stubborn determination to run, she told Runner’s World, was triggered when people told her she shouldn’t do it.

“I think it was pretty much just that they said no,” she said.

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The daughter of endurance athletes—her mother, a music teacher, once ran the Vermont City Marathon (though not until she was 25), and her father, Ian, a lawyer, ran Boston, New York, and other marathons before migrating to mountain-biking—Lila runs cross-country and Nordic skis for her high school, Champlain Valley Union in Hinesburg, Vermont, which has impressive strings of state championships in both sports.

But she says she took up long-distance running for its stress relief.

“I love how it really gives me the chance to be out in nature by myself,” she said. “I don’t have to talk to anybody, which is great. It’s an amazing opportunity to clear your mind. It’s meditative.”

She likes listening to podcasts including The Moth and This American Life while running, which she does in the spring when there’s no cross-country.

Soon Lila found herself completing 13 miles at a stretch. When, at 14, she began to talk to her parents about running a marathon, “We thought it was a bad idea,” Ian Carleton said. “And her coaches thought it was en even worse idea than we did.”

“All we can do is say no,” Ian said. “We can’t lock the door, so she walked out on a Saturday morning and came back 26 miles later. That day was pretty much symbolic of our relationship with Lila.”

So her parents instead began talking about the healthiest ways for her to train, and what she—a vegan, “mostly”—should eat.

That didn’t mean the marathon was a definite thing. The board for the Vermont City Marathon was hesitant at the idea of making an exception to its minimum age of 16 (although a 9-year-old boy had been allowed to run about a decade earlier); the race was on the last weekend of May, and Lila wouldn’t turn 16 until July.

The International Marathon Medical Directors Association recommends that no one be allowed to enter marathons until they’re 18 because young runners who are still developing are prone to the same kinds of stress fractures, joint damage, and other injuries that plague young gymnasts.

The board required that the Carletons read the association’s white paper on the subject, consult with coaches and a doctor, and sign a release.

“I have very few things I have a huge opinion about, but one of them is why are we even entertaining the idea of a young person entering the marathon,” said Sam Davis, a member of the board and the online running coach of marathon parent RunVermont. “If my daughter had approached me at that age, I would have told her no. You have to go through the maturation process of running the races that are age appropriate.”

He says: “We certainly as a running community want to foster young people’s excitement around running, but it doesn’t have to start with a marathon. Kids are passionate about a lot of things. It doesn’t mean they should be doing all of them.”

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Davis gets no argument—on that, at least—from Lila.

“I don’t take it lightly,” she said of all the warnings she received. “Precautions are definitely necessary. But there shouldn’t be a closed door. It is something people my age should be able to do.”

In the end, the marathon let her in.

Lila started struggling at mile 18, texting her father that she wanted to stop. In hindsight, she says, she knew she wouldn’t. “I spent months training. There was no way I was going to not finish,” she said.

She was out for a run again a few days later on the family’s European vacation with her parents, through Paris.

She plans to keep running in high school, where she will be a junior in the fall and hopes to make the varsity cross-country team. She has her eye on a few more marathons. And she also has started to think about entering a 50- to 100-mile ultramarathon.

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